Government Agencies Each Have Their Own Way of Doing Things
Application modernization will look different for every state or local agency, depending on its environments and goals. From New York to Florida and California, agencies have different rules and different ways of doing things. But they all should start with an assessment to confirm the current condition of everything.
Traditionally, each government agency has had its own data center. An agency may want to migrate from on-premises to the cloud. In the cloud, the cloud service provider has some responsibility for maintaining the environment, by upgrading or patching the operating system, for example. By taking this off the plate of government entities, agency officials can focus more on how to provide value to the citizens of their jurisdictions.
Agencies also worry about how to manage operations smartly and boost value to taxpayers. Containerization allows agencies to handle their infrastructure and code with common policies, increasing operational efficiency and ensuring value for their constituents.
DISCOVER: Modernize citizen services with a strong IT foundation.
The Value of Efficiency and Portability Across Government Domains
Many state agencies have not mastered articulating their goals in requests for proposals on modernization. We’ve seen very few that could coherently express what they mean by “efficiency” and how they apply a framework toward that goal.
A contractor’s ability to form a partnership with a government agency starts with how well an RFP is written, pursuant to what the agency actually wants. Nothing can move forward until the agency has all of the pertinent details. Adding to that complexity, each government agency deals with different IT information and handles it in its own way. This means that expertise and artifacts as listed won’t necessarily be portable, even to another department in the same state.
A government agency may release one RFP for an enterprise resource planning system, for example, and another RFP for a customer relationship management system at another agency. IT service providers must operate in that siloed environment and strive to provide value despite the differences in systems and protocols.
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